The falcon’s call

Awed by an encounter with a bird of prey high above a Texas river, Anthony Baker ponders both the place and his place.

Anthony Baker

Anthony Baker is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He is currently exploring the intersection of classical accounts of Christian holiness with current issues in ecology.

A view of a lightly misted valley to mountains in a desert area.

The view from the South Rim of the Big Bend National Park.

National Park Service Digital Image Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing God in Big Bend

The scream from the sky shattered the quiet calm of my cliffside campsite. I'd never heard such a sound—it was like a large crow had decided to try and quack. I rushed out of my tent, where I'd collapsed after making the seven mile trek up the mountain, to find the source of this alarming noise.

I was up on the rim of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, where I'd come on a solitary backpacking retreat. The "big bend" is the abrupt L-turn of the Rio Grande river, as it changes course from southeast to northeast. At the heart of the park rise the stark and severe Chisos Mountains, and the crown jewel of the Chisos is surely the South Rim. A thousand feet beneath me, a sheer drop from where I've staked my tent, there is a whole other mountain range. And ten miles away to the southeast I could see gorgeously striped limestone ridges across the river in northern Mexico.

It's a place that puts you in the presence of the sublime. Everett Townsend, the pathfinder responsible for bringing the region under the protection of Franklin Roosevelt's government, was particularly awed by this view. As a biographer put it, the view from the South Rim allowed him to

"see God as he had never seen Him before and so overpoweringly impressed him that he made note of its awesomeness…"

What does it mean, though, to see God in a place? Do I need to be up high and far away, staring into sublime depths? The South Rim gives me the impression that I'm hovering like an eagle over the earth, not standing on it like a human. Why are these the places that we think we sense the divine?

I'd like to think that seeing God in a place can be just as much about close and near attention as it is about sublime distances. What does God look and sound like here, if I stand on the ground and pay as much attention as I can to what I see and hear around me?

The Falcon's cry

I had no Internet connection on the Rim, so when I heard that bird cry out over my head I tried to burn the sound into a mental audio file. Jumping from my tent, I saw a large predator bird shooting directly above me and out over the cliff's edge. The size and shape—a large flying crossbow—told me that I'd been hailed by a peregrine falcon. A sign near my site told me that the section of the ledge where I was camping—where the South and East Rims meet—is in fact a protected nesting ground for the birds, closing to human trekkers each spring.

The peregrine is the world's fastest animal of any kind. They can dive at 200 miles per hour. That means they can only hunt birds in flight, since if they attacked anything on the ground at that speed they would both wind up, as my Granny would put it, "nothing but a greasy spot on the pavement."

A display down at the park's visitors' center had already filled me in on the near demise of the remarkable bird. DDT, a killing-machine of a pesticide that Rachel Carson called out in her book The Silent Spring in the 60s, triggers an immuno-response in female birds who have ingested it into their bodies. This response limits the calcium they can supply to their eggshells. As a result, the eggs were too vulnerable to predators or simply weather, and the embryos were not surviving.

We gave the Nobel Prize to the scientist who discovered how to use DDT to kill insects. It made so much sense, after World War II, to find ways to kill the pests who were spreading disease among the wounded soldiers and other victims of the war. But we were not yet thinking, in those days, about what else we might be killing. Now we're at least thinking, even while we're still killing.

Sin and redemption on the mountain

What does the falcon, soaring off the Rim, reveal to me about God? Consider, for instance, the doctrine of sin. Taken as an abstraction, sin is what theologians call the manifold ways that humans can turn from their holy God. But what if we fill that doctrine in with attentiveness to the story the falcon tells us? Here on the Rim, sin looks like failing to be awed enough by this remarkable life form to notice, until almost too late, that we are killing it.

Similarly, redemption, in the Christian telling of things, refers to the way that God overcomes sin and restores holy relationship. Here on the rim, redemption looks like a shared grief over the damage we've done. It looks also like the effort to protect this space as a bird sanctuary—literally a "holy place." It looks like a hope that falcon and human, like the bird and its own prey, can find a balance of mutual respect and coexistence.

The warning call of God

When I came down the mountain, I got on the Wi-Fi at the lodge outside the park and went searching for bird calls. I found a match for the sound that I'd heard - that caw-quack of a scream. It was the warning call of a peregrine falcon who has found predators in its nesting grounds. The bird was talking about me! Maybe somewhere in her DNA she recognized me as one of the DDT users that ruined her ancestors' eggshells. Hearing that call, as the bird flew off into sublime depths and distances, I suspect I was hearing about the mystery of life, the damage of sin, and the beauty of redemption. In other words, I was hearing the voice of God.

Explainer

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

3 May 2024

5 min read

Adapting Doctor Who: it's time for change

The fan debate on associating disability with evil lacks nuance.

Harry Gibbins

Harry Gibbins is a doctoral researcher at the University of Aberdeen. His PhD concerns the intersection between autism and Christian ministry.

Davros, an alien leader sits in the lower half of a Dalek.

Davros: leader of the Daleks.

In an interview with behind-the-scenes show Doctor Who Unleashed, returning showrunner Russel T Davies had this to say about how iconic Doctor Who baddie Davros was to be portrayed in a mini-episode produced for charity event Children in Need last year.

“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he's a fantastic character, time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there's a very long tradition of this.”

He continues to explain that this led the production team to depict Davros differently. Gone is the facial scaring, the wheelchair, the robotic eye, and the mechanical hand. Now, as Davies explains, Davros is seen through a lens in which disability stops being a way of identifying evil.

“This is our lens, this is our eye. Things used to be black and white, they’re not black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this now.”

Davies’ comments caused somewhat of a split online with some fans. On the one hand, Davies is continuing a tradition that can be traced back to his previous work on Doctor Who between 2005 and 2010. For example, he purposefully wrote Billie Piper’s character Rose Tyler as working class to cut against the gain of the prim-and-proper received pronunciation of previous companion characters. Perhaps Davies was tired of the limited scope of once again portraying the villain as disabled. Just as he didn’t want another female companion who lacked agency and depth, depiction of Davros as disabled simply wouldn’t fit with this modern incarnation of the show. On the other hand, in his comments, Davies seems to suggest that if this character ever appears again, he will not be disabled, even if it contradicts previous storylines, retroactively removing this part of the character as if it was never there to begin with.

Davros isn’t evil because he’s disabled, so why is Davies so hellbent on changing something that wasn’t an issue to begin with?

But is Davies’ efforts necessary? Reddit user u/Bowtie327 suggests that Davros’ disability isn’t important, “I can’t say I ever even drew a connection around Davros, being evil, and being disabled”, whilst another user u/PenguinHighGround claims that as a disabled person themselves they found him “weirdly inspiring, his (sic) goals are abhorrent, but he didn’t let his physical issues limit him”. X user @Dadros3 highlights how, as a wheelchair user, Davros has become a sort of science-fiction icon. He euphemistically states that “evil comes in all forms, all races, all genders, all abilities, and all disabilities. We cannot stand by and allow the cancellation of something for fear of offence that doesn’t exist”.

We are starting to see where the conversation heads; there are worries of by simply removing disability from the equation no effort is made to necessarily further the cause of disabled representation in media. Similarly, Davros isn’t evil because he’s disabled, so why is Davies so hellbent on changing something that wasn’t an issue to begin with? Whether it's that Davros’ disability wasn’t noticed by a majority able-bodied audience, or that his evil ideology has nothing to do with being disabled, Davros should stay put!

What becomes clear is that the changes made to depicting Davros is a product of the philosophy of change that is woven into the show’s DNA.

There’s a nuance that I believe has been missed by these arguments, a nuance that speaks to the philosophy that underpins what has led Doctor Who to last so long. I do not believe that Davies is suggesting that we pretend that harmful depictions of disabled people didn’t happen. Rather, this is a progression of a core part of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who encompasses change. Whether it’s the titular character’s face changing every few years, new story motifs coming and going, or even entirely new production teams, change is what keeps the Doctor Who machine whirring. It is clear that in this new era of the show that Davies is looking for a sort of fresh start. That is what keeps Doctor Who alive, and I think it’s what can make it such a great show. The ability to, despite its long history, still tell a new story. Times where I think the show has suffered has been when it has tried too hard to emulate what has come before.

This is a good opportunity to look back at how disability has been characterised in the media. It is good to sit with this tension even if we didn’t notice it and even if we don’t necessarily take offence. Interestingly, in the brief discussions Davies has had in the behind the scene footage he never mentions offence, nor does he want to attribute blame onto anyone for depicting a wheelchair user in such a way. Instead, he looks forward, just as we do as an audience. Forwards to opportunities to encapsulate the real lived experiences of disabled people, not only and narrowly looking at it as a way of identifying the baddie. Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine in 2022, casting director Andy Pryor stated that he is actually intentionally trying to cast more disabled actors claiming that “If you can’t cast diversely on Doctor Who, what show can you do it on?”. This is even reflected in the set design, with the TARDIS now being completely wheelchair accessible. What becomes clear is that the changes made to depicting Davros is a product of the philosophy of change that is woven into the show’s DNA.

The original 1975 story ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, in which Davros first appears, is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer; no attempt has been made to alter the original to remove the problematic depiction of disability. These stories are still there for us to watch and learn from, not to pave over and pretend they didn’t happen. Perhaps this means Davies and the rest of the production team at Bad Wolf will be cautious about featuring Davros again. What we can say is that Doctor Who is a unique icon in the television space in the way it demonstrates how we respond to change.